In many parts of the world, widespread abuse of children's rights to care and protection is hindering progress in alleviating poverty and ensuring the poorest and most vulnerable children are able to gain their basic rights. Across contexts, children face widespread protection risks including family separation, displacement, attack, sexual exploitation and abuse, recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups, trafficking, child labour, neglect and lack of care among many others. These violations have significant and lasting harmful effects on children's well-being and long term success. How to respond to prevent and mitigate these risks on a wide scale is a profound yet unanswered problem that is being explored in new interagency research in Sierra Leone. Alongside government and the family, the community is a crucial source of potential support for children vulnerable to child protection risks. A significant gap is that community protection for children are often not backed by effective support from aspects of the government system such as social workers and police. This research will for the first time systematically evaluate the effect of community-led interventions to better link communties with government services and systems to support vulnerable children. Importantly the research will develop and measure children's protection and well-being outcomes, that is the real changes that children experience in their health, safety and happiness. The research will provide a unique opportunity to tell us if and how these community-led interventions are effective, how they can be sustainable and also how they can be taken to scale to impact on larger numbers of vulnerable and marginalised children. Using a public health approach this research will develop population-based measures of children's protection and well-being outcomes. This inter-agency evaluation brings together in collaboration for the first time, key international organisations who are implementing and funding child protection programmes. It is therefore an extraordinary opportunity to fill some of the significant evidence gaps and inform deep changes in policy and practice across these organisations and more widely. Through this inter-agency evaluation initiative, the following critical questions for child protection policy will begin to be answered: 1. Do community-led interventions to strengthen linkages with formal systems improve children's protection and well-being outcomes? 2. How can changes in the effectiveness of child protection mechanisms be measured using population based measures of children's protection and well-being be that reflect a mixture of local understandings and also international child protection standards? The research will run from 2012 to 2014 in two Districts in Sierra Leone - Moyamba and Bombali Districts. The research is led by the Columbia Group for Children in Adversity in partnership with Save the Children.

How active are children in politics? They don't vote. They rarely support political parties. They seem untainted by political mudslinging, unsullied by the warmongers' guilt. Rather, they appear innocent, vulnerable and passive. Yet they are political. They carry upon their shoulders the hopes of nation, region, religion, society, family. In this latent potentiality, they sit at the heart of adults' projections of new futures, whether at moments of violence and revolution or within the quest for peace and stability. Since childhood was 'invented' in Britain, Europe and beyond, adults have made use of children at an individual and collective level to promote their own notions of the future. Children bear the burden of social expectations: they are 'agents of future promise'. While this research project seeks to examine children and ideology in the Western past, it also begins to think about how children are still being ideologically used in the contemporary world. Through our collaboration with external partners, we will start to examine how past insights can influence present practice. The project is underpinned by three research questions: 1. How have children been ideologically used for political/cultural purposes? 2. Why have they been used like this? 3. How can we better understand the consequences of this instrumentalisation? We will complete three case studies comparing societies, time and place, and using historical and archaeological methodologies. Using Britain and France in cross-national comparison reveals the sharp differences in the relationship between children, family and state in a monarchy and a republic, at key moments of nation-building, domestic and international conflict, and reconstruction. King will analyse the way that children featured in projections of new futures towards the end of the Second World War and into the postwar era in Britain. Two further case studies will emerge in direct comparison to the PI's research. Crewe will examine children's material culture in Britain from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and the way that it mobilized ideologies of gender, empire and war. Dodd's work focuses on the role assigned to French children (1940-1944) as mobile agents of national unity, tasked rhetorically and practically with healing national political divisions. The conclusions drawn from the three case studies will be compared and disseminated, and then written into a History & Policy paper in order to bring the question of the ideological instrumentalisation of children to the attention of policy makers. A key objective of the project is the cross-sector conference, held towards the end of the project. The conference seeks to assemble a network of academic researchers and policymakers, NGO, education and museum practitioners, all concerned with childhood whether in terms of education, health, welfare or culture. Through the presentation of research and practice, roundtable discussions and ideas generation, we will prepare the ground for future projects that put research on the past into the service of practice in the present. The project contributes to the burgeoning historical debate on childhood and youth in the past. It also seeks to raise awareness of the ideological use of children (gendered, political, religious, commercial). By establishing ways in which we can work better with practitioners who can make good use of our insights from the past, the research will have benefits for children's wellbeing in the future.

Interaction with machines is commonplace in the modern world, for a wide range of everyday tasks like making coffee, copying documents or driving to work. Forty years ago, these machines existed but were not automated or intelligent. Today, they all have computers embedded in them and can be programmed with advanced functionality beyond the mechanical jobs they performed two generations ago. Tomorrow, they will be talking to each other: my calendar will tell my coffee maker when to have my cuppa ready so that I can arrive at work on time for my first meeting; my satnav will tell my calendar how much time my autonomous car needs to make that journey given traffic and weather conditions; and my office copier will have documents ready to distribute at the meeting when I arrive in the office. And they will all be talking to me: I could request the coffee maker to produce herbal tea because I had too much coffee yesterday; and the copier could remind me that our office is (still) trying to go paperless and wouldn't I prefer to email the documents to meeting attendees instead of killing another tree? This scenario will not be possible without three key features: an automated planner that coordinates between the various activities that need to be performed, determining where there are dependencies between tasks (e.g., don't drive to the office until I get in the car with my hot drink); a high level of trust between me and this intelligent system that helps organise the mundane actions in my life; and the ability for me to converse with the system and make joint decisions about these actions. Advancing the state-of-the-art in trustworthy, intelligent planning and decision support to realise these critical features lies at the centre of the research proposed by this Trust in Human-Machine Partnerships (THuMP) project. THuMP will move us toward this future by following three avenues of investigation. First, we will introduce innovative techniques to the artificial intelligence (AI) community through a novel, intra-disciplinary strategy that brings computational argumentation and provenance to AI Planning. Second, we will take human-AI collaboration to the next level, through an exciting, inter-disciplinary approach that unites human-agent interaction and information visualisation to AI Planning. Finally, we will progress the relationship between Technology and Law through a bold, multi-disciplinary approach that links legal and ethics research with new and improved AI Planning. Why do we focus on AI Planning? A traditional sub-field of artificial intelligence, Planning develops methods for creating and maintaining sequences of actions for an AI (or a person) to execute, in the face of conflicting objectives, optimisation of multiple criteria, and timing and resource constraints. Ultimately, most decisions result in some kind of action, or action sequence. By focussing on AI Planning, THuMP captures the essence of what a collaborative AI decision-making system needs to do. We believe that most AI systems will (need to) involve a human in-the-loop and that it is crucial to develop new AI technologies such that people can use, understand and trust them. THuMP strives for complete understanding and trustworthiness through transparency in AI. We will develop and test a general framework for "Explainable AI Planning (XAIP)", in which humans and an AI system can co-create plans for actions; and then we instantiate two use cases for this framework that focus on resource allocation in two very different critical domains. A cross-disciplinary project team of seven investigators, four collaborators and four postdoctoral research assistants will work with three project partners--a leading oil & gas services corporation; a leading international charity; and a leading global law firm--to move us into this envisioned future. An ambitious and realistic programme of networking, development, evaluation and public engagement is proposed.

1) Produce and disseminate high-quality, evidence-based research that informs local, national, and international policies responses to contemporary challenges: Expanding on our work using innovative methodologies to produce impactful research on ongoing humanitarian and governance crises, including conflict, mass displacement, Ebola and COVID-19, and outputs that have often shaped states and international organisations' responses to co-produce peer reviewed research, policy briefs and blogs with partners from the Global South. The focus will be on ensuring research outputs reach relevant audiences and cement the utility of a public authority lens for designing appropriate policy responses to contemporary crises and governance challenges, including strategic priorities identified by the ESRC and UKRI. Here, CPAID will draw on its existing relationships with academic institutions, and development and humanitarian organisations, to amplify the reach and impact of its research. 2) CPAID will produce comparative work to explore the extent to which 'public authority' can help us understand difficult dynamics in the Global South and north: The aim will be to further explore the utility of a public authority lens, developed in African contexts, for exploring contemporary governance dynamics and policy responses in UK, Europe and elsewhere, as well as Africa. Ongoing and new comparative research will fill gaps in knowledge of how populations and authorities are responding to emerging challenges and crises. This is important in an era defined by global crises, populist and polarised politics, and the retreat of state and international governance institutions. 3) CPAID will use innovative approaches and outputs to ensure a public authority lens remains a feature of knowledge production, analyses and policy responses: During the transition phase CPAID will work to ensure that its lessons and public authority lens is taken up and applied by new generations of researchers and practitioners confronting and debating complex collective action problems and waning trust in mainstream governance institutions. This will be achieved through accredited courses that centre a public authority lens in their understanding of development and humanitarian problems and practice, and through knowledge products such as blogs, policy briefs, journal papers, edited volumes, and textbooks that demonstrate the utility of the concept for knowledge generation, analysis, and policymaking. Alongside this, CPAID will continue to work with, mentor and co-produce research with academics, development practitioners and organisations living and working in challenging contexts and to disseminate it through a range of innovative mediums - from cartoons to podcasts and videos. 4) CPAID will enhance existing partnerships and build new ones to ensure reciprocal knowledge exchange and capacity building: The centre will use its long-standing collaborations with local partners to hold a series of round tables, workshops and knowledge dissemination activities that enable reciprocal capacity building and knowledge exchange, both between those from the Global North and south, and among them. This will not only enable CPAID researchers to further understand and rethink research relationships and inequalities, but also ensure new partnership with academics and organisations in the Global South and north advance our core mission of supporting a broad spectrum of voices to challenge mainstream ways of working, analysing governance and collective action problems, and policymaking. This will include collaborations with development and humanitarian organisations working on the frontline of contemporary crises.

Uncertainty quantification, verification and validation are crucial to establish the reliability and reproducibility of all forms of computer-based simulation. We propose to establish an open source and open development VVUQ toolkit optimised for efficient execution at current pre- and emerging exascale, which will raise new challenges and new opportunities for simulations in fields as diverse as fusion and climate modelling. Computer simulation results are validated compared with experiment in several ways, ranging from qualitative to quantitative measures which apply a validation metric. Likewise, verification is concerned with confirmation that the mathematical model and corresponding algorithm have been coded correctly. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is concerned with understanding the origins of and assessing the magnitudes of the errors which accompany computer simulations, whether epistemic or aleatoric. VVUQ is necessary for any simulation that makes predictions in advance of an event to become actionable - that is, for its output to be useful in any form of decision-making process, from government interventions in pandemics to the choice of materials to combine for aircraft wing production. Here, exascale computing offers more opportunities to make actionable predictions. Moreover, because VVUQ is intrinsically compute intensive due to its ensemble-based execution pattern, it too requires exascale resources, as well as advanced resource management strategies to efficiently manage the large numbers of concurrent runs necessary. We propose to establish an open source and open development VVUQ toolkit optimised for efficient execution at current pre- and emerging exascale. This will include advanced approaches for surrogate modelling in order to minimise the expense and time needed to perform the most compute-intensive calculations and will demonstrate its efficiency gains for a diverse array of VVUQ workflows within multiple scientific applications, and on architecturally and geographically diverse emerging exascale environments. The software developed, implemented and benchmarked in this project will become an open and invaluable asset to the UK ExCALIBUR community but also much more widely within UK and internationally as high-performance computing enters the exascale era. The proposed exascale toolkit will be built on a combination of widely used tools and services which will be evolved to handle systems of increasing levels of complexity. These include components from the VECMA project (EasyVVUQ, FabSim3, QCG-PJ and EasySurrogate), as well as the UCL-Alan Turing Institute Multi-Output Gaussian Process Emulator (MOGP). We will apply these capabilities to several applications, including: (i) the UKAEA's tokamak fusion modelling use case for which a working software environment will be produced; (ii) weather and climate forecasting for the Met Office; (iii) turbulent flow simulation for environmental science; (iv) prediction of advanced materials properties of graphene-polymer based nanocomposites for aerospace applications; (v) high-fidelity patient-specific virtual human blood flow system for medical research; (vi) drug discovery; and (vii) human migration.